By Steve Pomper
The anti-cop lefts’ lack of understanding of proper and necessary law enforcement procedures is dumbfounding. But I think it’s more a belligerent ignorance than a legitimate ignorance (simply not knowing enough to understand). The anti-cop left doesn’t want to understand or worse, they understand and mischaracterize it intentionally.
I read an opinion article recently, written from an anti-police perspective. How do I know? If you’re pro-police, or at least unbiased, you don’t claim police “kidnapped protesters” when it was plainclothes officers legally detaining suspected rioters. But there it is again, right? The Left altering established definitions and then attacking the Right based on those partisan changes.
Now, of course, the writer has every right to publish an opinion piece no matter how misleading or vile. This is a right recognized by the Right and acknowledged by the Left, but only for their political side—all else is “hate speech.” And the Left continues to work toward undermining law enforcement in America.
Still, during a 2020 attempt to re-authorize the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), both Democrats and Republicans “arrived to [sic] Capitol Hill to jointly override President Trump’s veto….” The writer quips, “they agreed on a line-item that also rebuked the Trump administration’s ‘law and order’ way of doing things.” I mean, who wants law and order? Oh, right… normal people.
Before we dig deeper into this issue, let’s explore an allusion I made above. It’s a tactic employed by the anti-cop left when attacking proper and necessary law enforcement uses of force. The Left routinely redefines common terms to fit their narrative. We’ve seen this proliferate with the help of the legacy media especially during last year’s ubiquitous riots. This is the Left’s penchant for referring to extreme violence (arson, looting, and even murder) as “mostly peaceful” (or simply peaceful) protests and protesters.
Even former President Barack Obama, during his “eulogy” for the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, sniped at cops when he said, “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.” Think about that. A former President of the United States of America is brazenly lying about the men and women who protect us all. Obama knows very well federal cops in Portland used force only against violent rioters—he knows that. But ideology is all that matters.
For example, in the article, the writer spews this nonsense. “In fact, the DHS’s [Department of Homeland Security] willingness to ignore the constitutional rights of protesters was one of the inciting events preceding the American Civil Liberties Union’s call to dismantle DHS” (the ACLU is another de facto defunct organization that’s betrayed itself). “Protesters?” A word when standing alone presupposes peaceful. Once again, American law enforcement officers at all levels of government do not use force on protesters. They use necessary force to control rioters.
NDAA supporters want to imitate Mayor Peduto. They want to inhibit federal law enforcement’s ability to use plainclothes and unmarked vehicle tactics and strategies to complete their public safety and federal facility protection missions. In Portland, rioters attacked municipal and federal government (and private) structures and assaulted law enforcement officers for months on end (they still are today). Yet some politicians have hopped on the anti-cop virtue-signal wagon and joined in pretending these were/are peaceful protests and not destructive and violent riots.
In Chapter 10 of my new book, The Obama Gang (NPA, 2021), I wrote about Obama sycophant Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto. He was one of many American mayors who got squeamish about the use of proper and necessary police tactics when dealing with violent rioters. First, he adopted the Left’s redefinition of “protester” and overrode his own eyes by instead choosing to believe his ideology-fueled imagination. Suddenly, riots and rioters no longer existed. They were all “peaceful protesters” no matter how many heads they bashed, stores they looted, or buildings they set ablaze.
Then, Mayor Peduto (who attended the police academy—never) grew a sudden aversion to his police department using plainclothes officers and unmarked police vehicles to tackle rioters committing crimes. He said he, “won’t tolerate this tactic in the future.” In The Obama Gang, I wrote, “Believe it or not, it’s hard to sneak up on criminals while in uniform and driving a marked patrol car. No, really; it’s true. Some criminals are actually able to figure out that those guys wearing police uniforms and driving marked police cars with light bars on the roofs are cops. Clever, eh?”
The lies and conflation from the anti-police left thrive. And, aside from their legacy media allies, they have plenty of support from politicians such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has a history of degrading law enforcement officers, even calling federal law enforcement “stormtroopers.” Pelosi and her ilk (like Oregon Gov. Kate Brown who denounced federal police for their “blatant abuse of power”) alleged federal officers defending the courthouse in Portland were not wearing uniforms with insignias, badges, and name tags and were acting unconstitutionally. Yet, another lie.
They are conflating uniformed officers on crowd controls duty with plain-clothed police officers who do not wear identifying insignias while conducting clandestine operations. That would kind of defeat the purpose, right? This insignia approach by the Left is not new. Some years back, in riot-strewn Seattle, the city council passed an ordinance making it a misdemeanor for officers not to wear an “officially sanctioned” name tag, including the exact proper dimensions and placement, on regular uniforms and riot gear.
Just to show you the knee-jerk radicalization of Seattle government, some city council members recently said they believed officers wore black bands across their badges to conceal badge numbers. They shrouded their badges to mourn a fellow officer killed in the line of duty. See how little respect those folks have for cops. That is just being mean.
The Left maliciously alters sociocultural definitions, lies about how cops do their jobs, misinforms about the nature of police incidents, and then combines that recipe into a toxic stew of false anti-cop narratives they try to force down Americans’ throats. Think about it. How else could people watch the massive violence and destruction, perpetrated by violent anarcho-Marxist alliances such as BLM and Antifa, with your own eyes, and not believe it?
People watch the flames glowing behind reporters, and the reporters or news anchors rarely if ever call the chaos riots. Instead, they continually refer to the conflagrations as, what else, “mostly peaceful protests.”